Ruthless Pride

  Some men are meant to sin...

  Pride made him what he is.

  But desire might change him forever...

  Millionaire CEO Joshua Lowell earned his icy reserve and arrogant pride through painful experience. He refuses to allow gorgeous but determined reporter Sophie Armstrong to dredge up his family’s dark past—or circulate rumors of his secret child. But Joshua’s fierce pride is at war with his heated desire for Sophie, the only woman who could ruin him...or save him from himself.

  USA TODAY Bestselling Author Naima Simone

  Seven Sins

  One man’s betrayal can destroy generations.

  Fifteen years ago, a hedge-fund hotshot vanished

  with billions, leaving the high-powered families

  of Falling Brook changed forever.

  Now seven heirs, shaped by his betrayal,

  must reckon with the sins of the past.

  Passion may be their only path to redemption.

  Experience all Seven Sins!

  * * *

  Ruthless Pride by Naima Simone

  This CEO’s pride led him to give up his dreams

  for his family. Now he’s drawn to the woman

  who threatens everything...

  Forbidden Lust by Karen Booth

  He’s always resisted his lust for his best friend’s sister—until they’re stranded together in paradise...

  Insatiable Hunger by Yahrah St. John

  His unbridled appetite for his closest friend is unleashed when he believes she’s fallen for the wrong man...

  Hidden Ambition by Jules Bennett

  Ambition has taken him far, but revenge could

  cost him his one chance at love...

  Reckless Envy by Joss Wood

  When this shark in the boardroom meets the one

  woman he can’t have, envy takes over...

  Untamed Passion by Cat Schield

  Will this black sheep’s self-destructive wrath flame

  out when he’s expecting an heir of his own?

  Slow Burn by Janice Maynard

  If he’s really the idle playboy his family claims,

  will his inaction threaten a reunion with

  the woman who got away?

  “I would’ve noticed you...”

  A liquid slide of lust prowled through Joshua like a hungry—so goddamn hungry—beast. The air simmered around them.

  “Do you want me to prove that I’m not some kind of stalker?” Sophie tilted her head to the side. “I’m dedicated to my job, but I refuse to cross the line into creepy...or criminal.”

  He ground his teeth against the apology that shoved at his throat. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.” And then he added, “That predilection seems to be in the air.”

  A tiny muscle ticked along her delicate but stubborn jaw. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  Moments earlier, Joshua had wondered if fury or desire had heated Sophie’s gaze.

  God help him, because masochistic fool that he’d suddenly become, he craved them both.

  He wanted her rage, her passion...wanted both to beat at him, heat his skin, touch him.

  To make him feel.

  * * *

  Ruthless Pride by Naima Simone is part of the Dynasties: Seven Sins series.

  Naima Simone

  Ruthless Pride

  USA TODAY bestselling author Naima Simone’s love of romance was first stirred by Harlequin books pilfered from her grandmother. Now she spends her days writing sizzling romances with a touch of humor and snark.

  She is wife to her own real-life superhero and mother to two awesome kids. They live in perfect, domestically challenged bliss in the southern United States.

  Books by Naima Simone

  Harlequin Desire

  Blackout Billionaires

  The Billionaire’s Bargain

  Black Tie Billionaire

  Blame It on the Billionaire

  Dynasties: Seven Sins

  Ruthless Pride

  Visit her Author Profile page at Harlequin.com, or naimasimone.com, for more titles.

  You can also find Naima Simone on Facebook, along with other Harlequin Desire authors, at Facebook.com/harlequindesireauthors!

  Dear Reader,

  I’m a PK—a pastor’s kid. So I know a little something about sins. LOL! When I found out my very first continuity would be based on the seven sins? Kismet, right? We were totally made for each other!

  In Ruthless Pride, Joshua Lowell is the oldest son of the infamous Vernon Lowell. When Vernon disappeared with millions of his clients’ money, he left his family—specifically, Joshua—to pick up the pieces. For fifteen years, Joshua has tried to repair the damage his father caused. Pride has kept him in the town of Falling Brook when he could’ve left like his brothers. And pride has him going head-to-head with the journalist of the local newspaper. She wants to resurrect the old history that he wants everyone to forget. He should resent stubborn, ambitious and beautiful Sophie Armstrong. And he does. But only if he could stop wanting her, too...

  Oh, yes. They’re adversaries, but these two can’t stay away from each other. I hope you enjoy all the steam and drama they generate! And I hope you love the Seven Sins series!

  Happy reading!

  Naima Simone

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Excerpt from Scandalous Reunion by Jules Bennett

  One

  “If your success was earned through hard work and honesty never apologize for it.”

  Joshua Lowell silently repeated the Frank Sonnenberg quote that had been a favorite of his father’s. He pinched the bridge of his nose, a low, dark growl rumbling in the back of his throat. Too bad Vernon Lowell hadn’t believed in the “practice what you preach” school of thought. According to that quote, his father had a ton of apologizing to do. Wherever he was—hell or a bungalow in some country without extradition policies.

  Dropping his head, he refocused his attention to the spreadsheets displaying the previous month’s profit-and-loss numbers for Black Crescent Hedge Fund’s investment in stock of a telecommunication company. Compared with this time last year, the investment was doing very well. Their clients would earn more than a modest return, and Black Crescent would receive a substantial management and performance fee...

  Unlike his father, Joshua had stuck to the more traditional investments such as stocks, bonds, commodities and real estate. Vernon had been a daredevil in business, which initially had made him one of the richest men in the tristate area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. That fearless and adventurous spirit had also increased the millions his very select clients had invested with him into high-yielding portfolios, and grew his boutique business into one of most successful in the area.

  It’d also cost those select clients millions. It’d devastated them.

  So no, while some might call Joshua’s business decisions rigid and even too conservative, he refused to do anything different. Too many people’s livelihoods and futures depended on him making those safe choices. He refused to be another Lowell who betrayed their trust. Who destroyed them.

  He’d been the last man standing when Vernon Lowell disappeared—for both the
company and his family. Because he’d left with not only his clients’ money, but the majority of his family’s, as well. So even though the last man sometimes wanted to yell and rage at the unfairness of it all, at the grief and shame that often pounded within him like a second heartbeat—at the death of his own dreams—one thing the last man couldn’t do was slip up or falter.

  He couldn’t afford to. Literally.

  “Josh, did you hear what I said? Of course you didn’t.” Haley Shaw, his executive assistant, snorted, answering her own question before he could respond. “Or you’re just ignoring me, which you should know by now doesn’t work. Whatever you’re doing now can be put aside for just a few moments. This is important,” she insisted, an edge invading her tone.

  “Haley. Not now,” he said without glancing up from his spreadsheet.

  “Well, I’m sorry to interrupt,” a brisk, husky but very feminine voice that carried zero hint of apology interjected, “but I’m afraid it’s going to have to be now.”

  Two small hands with slender, unadorned fingers flattened on either side of his computer monitor. Surprised, all he could do for several long seconds was stare at those delicate hands. At the short, unpolished nails, the thin map of light blue veins under sun-kissed skin. Why did he have the odd but strong urge to place his mouth right on the joint where hand met wrist—and sip?

  Hell. They were fucking hands.

  The mental but mocking admonishment didn’t stop him from traveling up the lengths of her arms clad in white sleeves to slim shoulders partially hidden by light brown and gold-streaked hair, past a graceful neck and slightly pointed but stubborn chin with its slight indent to a face that—goddamn.

  Deliberately, he eased back in his office chair, careful to control all the muscles in his face. He forced himself to maintain the cold, aloof expression that he’d adopted and mastered fifteen years ago as a defense. But inside...inside, lust slammed into him like a hurricane intent on leveling every structure in its path. And right now he was the only thing remaining, and Christ, he was shaking right down to his foundation.

  Thickly lashed silver eyes that gleamed with barely suppressed anger. Striking cheekbones that lent a bold strength to otherwise ethereal features. A gently sloped nose and a mouth that had him gripping the arms of his chair like they were the last lifeboat that kept him from drowning. Thing was, he wanted to leap from the safety of the raft and dive into that wide, full-lipped mouth. Teach it what it was created for. Show it how it could give both of them the filthiest of pleasures...

  His heartbeat echoed its thundering rhythm in his cock, pounding out a need that ricocheted through him.

  Unsettled by his visceral reaction to this stranger—a stranger who had barged into his corporate office uninvited—he narrowed his eyes on her, allowing the corners of his mouth to curl in a derisive snarl.

  Haley heaved a sigh. “Joshua, let me introduce you to Sophie Armstrong,” she said, a thick coat of resignation painting her words.

  “I don’t know a Sophie Armstrong,” he stated coldly to his assistant, although he didn’t remove his gaze from the woman in front of him. Maybe some instinctual part of him recognized that she was the biggest threat in the room—a threat to his schedule, his carefully laid-out day...his control.

  “The name would be familiar if you bothered to answer any one of my phone calls or emails.” She snorted, cocking a dark eyebrow. “I’ve been trying to contact you, Mr. Lowell, and you’ve ducked and dodged every attempt.”

  He frowned. Yes, he’d been busier than usual lately, but he would’ve remembered if she’d reached out to him. “I’ve never ducked or dodged anyone.” Not even when he’d desperately longed to. “Especially someone who doesn’t have enough manners or sense to not force herself into a place of business where she wasn’t invited or wanted without an appointment. Now that you’re here, you have exactly thirty seconds—twenty-nine more seconds than I would give anyone else—to explain what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Others would’ve—had—recoiled and backed down from the hard, ice-cold fury in his voice. But Sophie Armstrong didn’t even flinch. Instead, she met his glare with one of her own. A quicksilver flash of surprise flickered within him. He wasn’t arrogant, but he also acknowledged his appeal to the opposite sex. Understanding his money proved just as much of a lure as the appearance he’d inherited from his handsome father, he never lacked for female attention. Or sex.

  But to this woman, he might as well be Quasimodo taking a break from his Notre Dame tower to hang out in the Black Crescent offices. Sophie Armstrong didn’t bother to employ any advantage her beauty might press—not that it would. But she didn’t know that.

  No, unless antagonism passed for charm these days, she was confrontational and contemptuous.

  And goddamn, if it wasn’t hot.

  She reached into the bag over her shoulder, withdrew a stack of papers and slapped the pile on his desk. “That’s what I’m talking about. All the emails I’ve sent you. And I can pull out my phone and scroll through and play every voice mail—there are fifteen of them. All asking you to reply in a timely manner. Apparently, your idea of timely and mine don’t coincide because I meant at least a couple of days and yours apparently runs along the line of seasons in Narnia.”

  The snort slipped from him before he could contain it. He shouldn’t be amused. And he certainly shouldn’t let her see it.

  “You have five seconds left,” he informed her, leaning forward and with a will that had been forged in the fires of desperation, humiliation and pride over a decade ago, he shifted his attention back to his screen. “I suggest you make the most of it.”

  A soft, feminine growl filled the air, and the reverberation of it rolled in his gut, clenching the muscles there so hard he nearly grunted in pain. With the wrenching came the dark but HD-clear image of her, head thrown back, all that hair sprawled across black sheets, beads of sweat dotting the slender column of her throat. And that same, rumbling growl vibrating from her. Only it sounded hungrier, needier...

  Christ, he needed her out of his office.

  “I’m assuming that king-of-the-manor-got-no-time-for-peasants thing intimidates other people, but I hate to break it to you. It does nothing for me.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and if Jesus had come down at that moment and warned him against giving in to his baser needs, Joshua still wouldn’t have been able to stop his gaze from dipping to the slightly less-than-a-handful but firm breasts that pushed against the plain white dress shirt. Guilt streaked through him, slick and dirty. He wasn’t his father; he didn’t ogle women or treat them like eye candy, there for his pleasure. Even women who made his dick hard but he didn’t particularly like. “I’m telling you now—like I did in my last voice message and two emails—I’ll be writing my story with or without you. But it would be a better one with you.”

  Story. What story?

  A sense of foreboding wormed its way into his chest, hollowing it out. Making room for the churning unease.

  “I repeat,” he stated, the flat tone revealing none of the steadily encroaching panic that crept into his vision, that squeezed his rib cage like a steadily tightening vise. “What are you talking about?”

  “The anniversary piece on the Black Crescent fiasco that I’m writing for the Falling Brook Chronicle. And unlike all of the articles written about that time period, I would like to include an interview with the company’s current CEO.”

  Anger crystallized within him, hard and diamond bright. And sharp enough to cut glass. The “get out” burned on his tongue, singeing him. But he extinguished the words before they could escape him, refusing to betray any emotion to this woman who sought to rip open the seams of the past, to expose old but unhealed wounds for public consumption. To relive the nightmare of his father emptying the family bank accounts as well as embezzling millions from his clients and disappearing, abandoning him, hi
s mother and brothers to the wolves. The abrasive rub of judging eyes and not-so-hushed whispers. The smothering guilt that ten families were left devastated and destitute because of his father’s actions. The agonizing pain from being deceived and abandoned by the man who’d raised him, who’d loved him and who he’d respected.

  This woman had no clue about the pressure from the weight of that guilt, that responsibility. How they straddled his shoulders to the point of suffocation at times. How dealing had become second nature to him. There’d been no one to lean on when his father disappeared, when he’d taken on the responsibility of repaying the families so they wouldn’t sue for the remaining money his father hadn’t disappeared with. When his mother withdrew from the exclusive community of Falling Brook, New Jersey. When his twin brother, Jacob, fled to Europe to backpack his problems away, and his youngest brother, Oliver, dropped out of college and become the poster child for professional playboy, complete with a nasty cocaine habit.

  Nothing in his Ivy League education—not even the economic courses he’d taken at his father’s insistence—had prepared him for being alone, grieving and terrified with the fate of not just his family but ten others on his still-young shoulders. Of having to make the bitter decision of burying his own dreams so he could repair those of others.

  He’d grown up fast. Too fast.

  And damn if he needed an article written by an ambitious reporter—no matter if she possessed the face of a fairy queen and the body of a Victoria’s Secret Angel—to drag him back to those desolate, black times when he’d breathed fear as much as he did air.

  “No.”

  Joshua gave her credit—she didn’t flinch at the flat, blunt answer.

  Instead, she tilted her head to the side, that fall of thick caramel-and-sunlight hair sliding over her shoulder, and studied him as if he were a problem to solve. Or an opponent to wrestle and pin into submission.

  “I can understand why you would initially be reluctant to speak with me—”

  “Oh, you can?” he interrupted, trying but failing to keep the bite from his voice. Silently, he cursed himself for revealing even that much. The last fifteen years had taught him that he couldn’t afford to betray the slightest weakness of character lest he be accused of being just like his father. Other people were allowed room for mistakes. He was not offered that courtesy. While others could trip up in private, his missteps were splashed across newspapers and online columns for fodder. Including her paper. “So you’ve had a—how did you so eloquently put it?—fiasco in your life and had every paper in the country report on it? Including the Falling Brook Chronicle? Which, if I remember correctly, was one of the harshest and most critical? Well, good,” he continued, not granting her the opportunity to answer. “Since you have experienced it, you’ll understand why I’m ending this conversation.”